Violence and sources of pride

When I was in Rajshahi this summer, I encountered representatives from the four major political parties (as part of a workshop offered by NDI, the National Democratic Institute). I had been invited to give a presentation on Leadership and Ethics and had been told to expect certain levels of hostility, even though I am originally from Germany and not the US. Instead, I encountered nothing but intelligent, open discussion and a willingness to consider various ideas, even from participants that clearly represented more fundamentalist aspects of Islam.

What troubled me then and troubles me now is the lack of alternatives, especially for young people who want to be proud of their country, who struggle for a sense of identity and freedom from foreign domination. When I look at the Constitution the Islami Chhatra Shibir, for example, it does remind me of some of the elements in Germany after World War I, of the young people trying to find a national identity and pride in the midst of a severe economic crisis and a somewhat damaged self-image.

It is easy to condemn radical elements in any society. However, in my experience, Bangladeshis are an unusually proud people, and the younger generations are looking desperately for a way to escape from demeaning foreign influences, from conditions where the best and brightest either lose hope or leave the country.

If I were a young Bangladeshi in Rajshahi, where would I turn as the best source of pride? That is a question to which we need to find more constructive answers.

Perhaps we can never fully eliminate frustration and violence from our world community, but we need to at least give proud young people, like the best young students in the Bangladeshi universities, an alternative - and it has to be an alternative that is based on local leadership, not on hand-outs from foreign Egos or based on mullet-national businesses that use cheap Bangladeshi labour for their own gain.

We all know that we cannot solve our problems by killing each other. The destructive potential of human beings has become far too great for such primitive responses to our frustrations. But simple trying to suppress anger and frustration is not the solution either, especially since there will be more of it, not less, in the foreseeable future.

What we need to do is create alternatives, where young people can join other movements, create other projects of their own, become proud leaders in a constructive sense, not by rebelling more and more violently against established forces.

I am myself a university professor, as fate would have it, in a leadership programme at an American university right now, so I sympathise both with the victims of this violence and with the frustration of the would-be leaders in Rajshahi. Where I think we have failed, collectively, is that we have not spent enough time together to understand the unique need for community-based pride and leadership in our best and brightest all over the world. We have to start this process now. We have to create avenues for community-based leadership and ambitious creativity, combined with local pride and confidence in a unique path forward. Bangladesh, too, has the right to a vision of the future which is so exciting to its young leaders that they would not want to waist their time on brutality and violence.